The halt in production will start January 1.

In another push to reduce harming emissions, China will effectively ban the local production of a total of 553 passenger car models starting from January 1. The announcement was made by the China Vehicle Technology Service Center, Bloomberg reports, and affects vehicles that don't meet the country's fuel consumption and emissions requirements.

We don’t know the full list of banned cars, which has been complied by the same organization, but it includes models from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Chevrolet, Volkswagen, and many more. According to the publication, vehicles with internal codes FV7145LCDBG (Audi), BJ7302ETAL2 (Mercedes) and SGM7161DAA2 (Chevrolet), all of them sedans, are affected by the sanction.

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Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, notes that the 553 banned vehicles are only a small portion of the passenger cars produced in the country. Wang Liusheng, an analyst working for China Merchants Securities Co., adds that this is the first time China is restricting the production of certain models and there’ll be more to come in the near future.

“To emphasize a cut back on energy consumption, such documents will surface frequently in the future,” Wang comments. “It’s an essential move to ensure the healthy development of the industry in the long run.”

China is still finalizing its timetable to stop production and sales of traditional internal combustion vehicles. The country’s government wants to switch entirely to what it calls “new energy vehicles” - hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and fuel-cell models, and plans them to account for about 40 percent of all sales there by 2030.

China wants to follow European countries with similar intentions, like France and the United Kingdom, which will ban sale of new diesel- and gasoline-powered vehicles by 2040. Last year, sales of electrified vehicles in China grew by 50 percent to 336,000 units and this number is expected to grow further this year.